


"Three Times Leslie and Ben Planned a Children's Concert, and One Time They Didn't"

by stillscape



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 11:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Essentially the title</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Three Times Leslie and Ben Planned a Children's Concert, and One Time They Didn't"

**01.**

Ben shut up, and tried to enjoy having provided a service for once. Despite the inherently dreadful nature of Freddy Spaghetti’s music, and despite the fact that he’d just spent way too much of his own money to listen to it…enjoying the concert actually wasn’t all that difficult.

Well. It was a nice day, after all.

And he had nothing against children. He liked kids, mostly, and although some of Pawnee’s seemed unusually rotund, they were having a good time, mostly. It was good that they were happy.

Beside him, Leslie was somehow serene and excited at the same time. He thought she might be happier than any of the children; and he thought about how that was because she liked making other people happy, not because she liked the music; and then he thought _hey, I kind of did that_.

His internal organs felt pleasantly warm, especially when he stole a glance at Leslie and caught her tapping one sneaker-clad foot lightly to the beat of _pesto makes a mess-to_.

“Really?” he asked, restraining his own elbow from nudging her in the ribs.

“Come on, this is a good one.” She grinned at him, squinting in the late afternoon sun. “Don’t be primavera, Ben.”

“Don’t be _what_?”

“Primavera.”

“What’s wrong with primavera?”

“ _Vegetables_ ,” she said, as though that was obvious.

“Oh.”

Ben, who liked primavera and wasn’t at all sure how he felt about pasta-related insults, returned his gaze to the stage.

Anyway, she was short and blonde. Totally not his type. And he might still have to fire her.

 

**02.**

“Leslie?” She looked up, startled, to see Ben in the doorway of her office, a file tucked between one arm and his ribcage. “Are you—what’s up?”

She swallowed once. _We have to break up and I don’t want to break up because I really like you but Ben, they asked me to run for office and I want to do it, and I can’t have a scandal about the fact that I’m breaking all sorts of government rules by sleeping with my boss_ was what was up, but Leslie didn’t say any of it. She couldn’t tell how much he had guessed about the whole situation, yet. Nor could she tell if she was acting differently around him in their more intimate moments, if she was giving her internal turmoil away. Was she kissing him differently, more desperately? Sometimes it felt like she was. But maybe it was just really, really good kissing…which was a little bit scary in itself, how much she liked kissing him.

“Nothing. Why. What’s up with you?” No one else was around the Parks department—she had no idea where they’d gone—so she quickly added, “Do you want to go make out somewhere?” It was on her mind now; once she started thinking about kissing Ben, it was really hard to stop.

Ben nodded. Abruptly, he spun on one heel, leaving the Parks offices in a virtual cloud of dust and turning right. She waited sixty seconds exactly, then left the offices herself, turned left, doubled back, headed up the staircase no one ever used because it had been built over a Wamapoke burial ground and might or might not have been haunted by angry spirits, and met Ben in their usual third-floor windowless conference room.

“You did call me in for a meeting about this year’s summer children’s concert,” he said, throwing the file onto the table.

“Right, right.” She flipped the file open, but didn’t read any of the pages. Instead, she unbuttoned her blazer…and the top button of her blouse. “Do we have the budget to get Freddy this year?”

The meeting derailed pretty quickly after that. “Hmm?” Ben asked, just before he pinned her gently against the wall and kissed her once, slowly and deeply. “Ms. Knope, are you trying to weasel extra funding out of the city by—Leslie?”

He was teasing her. She knew he was teasing her. They’d teased each other about it several times before, and it had been _funny_ , then—both the idea that she might sleep with someone as a career move, and that Ben might trade sexual favors for preferential treatment. They’d joked about it and then he’d rejected three of her proposals; she liked him a little bit more for it (even though she’d really wanted the proposals to go through).

This time, however, she broke. Just a tiny bit, but it was a break nevertheless.

“Don’t—don’t even joke about that,” she said, her voice unsteady.

“Hey. Leslie, I—Leslie—shit. I’m sorry.” Ben dropped his arms to her shoulders and pulled her in, swinging them both around so his back was against the wall. For a few moments, they remained quiet. Leslie kept her face pressed against Ben’s chest and her hands against his collarbones, feeling the cotton against her skin, focusing her vision on a particular half-inch of plaid.

Ben kissed the top of her head, and still, she didn’t move.

Was he going to figure everything out? God, she hoped not.

“You know I’d never allocate extra money to Parks just because—”

“I know.” _If you did_ , she thought, _if you were the kind of person who exchanged government funds for sex, then I wouldn’t want to sleep with you in the first place_. Finally, she pushed away and met his eye with what she hoped was a composed, winning smile. “I’m still going to ask you to increase the budget. Just not—”

“Nope.”

“It’s for the children, Ben.”

“You have to hire a cheaper act this year. I already called Freddy—”

“Yeah, I did too,” she said, sinking into a chair. She didn’t need to read Ben’s file; she already knew everything there was to know about the children’s concert budget. “Apparently last year someone paid him more than his usual fee to do our concert, and now he seems to think the increase should be standard.”

Ben settled onto the edge of the conference table. “That’s not my fault.”

“What are you talking about? It’s totally your fault.”

“Okay, yeah, it kind of is,” he admitted. “But you still have to hire a cheaper act this year.”

“Fascist hard-ass.”

Ben took a deep breath, his spine sagging slightly as he exhaled, and moved his hand to cover hers.

 

**03.**

April didn’t even try to keep her nostrils from flaring when Ron threw a binder on her desk and told her to do the thing for which Leslie had left insane, excessive instructions.

“You agreed to this,” he said.

“I would never have agreed to—” she started, but something in Ron’s unblinking, unflinching gaze made her cut off the sentence. “Fine.”

She had, after all, agreed to pick up some of Leslie’s slack. But that had been for Leslie’s _campaign_. Sure, Leslie wasn’t around quite as much now that she had two jobs and two offices, but… a children’s concert? Really?

“I’m just gonna hire Andy to stand in the park with a guitar,” she told Ron.

“That is fine by me.”

“Also, I’m his manager, and I demand four thousand dollars for his services. Boom. Expense approved, because I’m in charge of this runaway train now.”

“You have one hundred dollars to spend on talent,” said Ron, ignoring the imaginary steam locomotive whistle she was pulling. “Or, more ideally, no dollars.”

According to the numbers now in front of April—she’d flipped open the binder—she in fact had four hundred dollars to spend on talent.

“Wait,” she called after Ron, who had taken one step back towards his office. “I’m not gonna hire Andy.”

“Hire whomever you see fit.”

April raised her eyebrows. “I’ll hire Duke Silver,” she said. “The kids’ll really dig his groovy jazz tunes.”

Ron managed not to flinch.

“Oh, yes, hire Duke Silver,” chimed in Jerry. “You know, my wife Gayle, she just adores him. I bet the moms of Pawnee would really love—”

“Shut up, Jerry. No one’s hiring Duke Silver,” April snapped.

“Right, right. Sorry.”

She thought she heard a tiny grunt of relief from Ron’s general direction. But maybe she hadn’t heard anything at all.

 

**04.**

“I miss working in the same building as you,” Leslie complained.

“I know. I miss it too.”

“But I get to come home to _that_ ,” she continued, licking her lips at the computer screen, “so I can’t complain too much, I guess.”

“Can I turn around now?” Ben asked, and then did it anyway, before she could say _no_. Not that she objected to having her husband’s face on the computer screen instead of…well. “I _really_ don’t want to have to explain butt-Skyping to anyone.”

“Come over here and make out with me?”

“Aren’t we both supposed to be working?”

Leslie sat up a little straighter. “Actually, yes. That’s why I set up this virtual meeting.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It’s children’s concert planning time.”

A momentary flicker of annoyance passed over Ben’s face, though it also could have been a computer glitch—who knew. She chose to believe the latter.

“Leslie, I don’t work for the government anymore.”

“No,” she agreed, “but weren’t you and Andy working with some sort of music-related charity? I thought maybe if the Sweetums Foundation wanted to be involved, they could cover some of the costs, and we could have a bigger concert this year.” Bigger than Eagleton’s, anyway. And bigger than last year’s. And _better_ than last year’s. Not that that would be difficult. She shuddered involuntarily at the memory of Orin’s pan flute, bagpipe, and Theremin ensemble.

“Oh, yeah, actually,” Ben said. He sat up straighter too. “Actually, that would be really great.”

They high-fived into their respective webcams.

“Turn it around,” Leslie ordered.

“Honey…”

“Please?”

“Okay, fine,” Ben grumbled, standing up again. “But you owe me later.”

“I promise to take all those books out of the bathroom tonight,” she said, quickly.

She could probably get out of tidying the bathroom, Leslie thought (though Ben was right, they did have to take all the books out if they were finally going to repaint it). She had plenty of ways to tempt him into doing something they’d rather both be doing. Like…planning a concert.

Or sex.


End file.
